Philo and Sophia work through every part of the Reading and Use of English paper together
These follow the same mechanics as CAE — multiple-choice cloze, open cloze, word formation, and key word transformation — but expect genuinely rare vocabulary, idiomatic nuance, and grammar patterns that rarely appear in everyday speech.
1.
"surgical precision" is the strongest fixed collocation here — "ruthless" and "harsh" both carry the wrong connotation (cruelty rather than exactness), and "exact" would be redundant beside "precision."
One long, often literary or essayistic text, with six four-option questions on detail, opinion, attitude, tone, purpose, and main idea — the same skills as CAE Part 5, applied to denser prose.
At C2, tone and implication often matter more than stated fact. Ask not just what a sentence says, but what attitude it reveals — irony, understatement, and hedged criticism are common at this level.
A long text with seven paragraphs removed (one more than at CAE), and eight options given. The extra gap means slightly less time per decision, so a systematic approach to cohesion clues matters even more.
Every gap has clues before it and after it. A common mistake is checking only what comes before — but a pronoun, a time reference, or a contrasting idea in the paragraph after the gap is just as often the deciding clue.
Work through this part methodically rather than trying to hold the whole text's structure in your head at once.
A text (or set of short texts) with ten questions matching detail, opinion, attitude, or specific information — the paper's final part, and often the one candidates are most tired for.
Since this part comes last, pace yourself through Parts 1–6 with a rough time budget in mind, so Part 7 isn't rushed. Ten questions is a fifth of the whole paper's questions.
8 marks
8 marks
8 marks
12 marks (2 per question)
12 marks (2 per question)
14 marks (2 per question)
10 marks
That's 72 marks from 53 questions — the heaviest weighting of any level so far in Parts 4 to 6.